Nat

We went to the movies tonight, Will Ferrell’s “Blades of Glory,” about 2 male figure skaters who end up skating as a pair. It wasn’t as funny as I had hoped, but it had its moments.

The theater was packed with teenagers doing what teenagers do at the movies: talk loudly, snort at the bathroom humor, and walk in and out in front of you throughout the movie. I moved from my original seat toward the very front of the theater to carve out a little private space for myself, but a late arriving group of 6 sat in the row behind me.

I like to watch the movies in peace and quiet, so all of the chatter around me bugged me. However, when I asked the two boys right behind me to please be quiet, they stayed absolutely silent for the rest of the movie.

It makes me really happy when people surprise me by being unexpectedly polite, or friendly, or helpful. Those boys could have told me off or ignored me. Instead, they respected my request and allowed me to enjoy the movie.

That made me feel even better than the movie did.

By the way, feel free to wait for the DVD. It’s not a great movie.

Late last year, my wife and I bought a Tempurpedic mattress. We call it the wonder bed, because it is ridiculously comfortable. It’s a great luxury to know that the final moments of the day will be relaxing, delicious even.

Tempurpedic mattress foam molds to your body like a cake mold, which makes you settle down to the point that the mattress supports each of your body parts equally. On nights after I have exercised heavily, I’m asleep virtually before my head hits the pillow. I rarely wake up in the middle of the night.

My wife and I work very hard, so it’s really nice to know that we can rest comfortably at the end of a hard day. It’s a small pleasure, but it’s one we have to look forward to every night. Including tonight.

I had another air travel mis-adventure with my boss yesterday. It started with a weird canceled flight, halfway through a one-stop journey. Then, there was a rush to fly standby, with no tickets because of a computer difficulty. When we had to leave security in DC to get to our transfer gate after arriving from Charlotte, we couldn’t get to our departure gate (no tickets, right?). Sorted that out, missed the plane anyway by two minutes. 3 hour layover. Home 5 hours late.

But here’s the thing. We went to fill the 3 hours in Reagan National by having dinner at Legal Seafoods. When dinner came, they had scrambled my order and forgotten my appetizer. In stunning contrast to the harried and largely ineffective service from the airline, the restaurant manager at Legal Seafoods immediately came to the table and comped the entire meal, for both of us! The revised order was perfect, and I left the restaurant feeling better about the chain than I ever did after a great meal there. I left a generous tip and felt great about the entire experience.

The lesson for me is that one person who sees a problem and jumps in to fix it means more to me than 10 people who don’t. I want us all to be that one person, starting with me. It’s not that hard.

It’s my last morning on Amelia Island, so rather than go to the gym, I walked on the beach. The sun rises very late here at this point, so I walked from dawn until the sun was fully up. There were a few dog walkers and joggers on the beach, but not many. The tide was coming in from just past low tide, and I stuck close to the water line.

Before I turned to come back toward my hotel room, I saw a line of birds, large ones, not seagulls. I’ll have to look up the name. The flew one after the other and dropped down from the sky, parallel to the shore. They were flying away from me, and the dropped like a heavy thread until they skimmed the crest of one curling wave, the way a surfer rides it inside the curl, but working less obviously.

Mankind has watched birds like this for tens of thousands of years, I’m sure. Yet it’s surprising and breathtaking every time. Beauty is, in some of its forms, inarguable.

It reminded me that there are simple routines I have that can make me feel fortunate to be who and where I am.

My stepdaughter will be inducted into the National Junior Honor Society Wednesday night. It will be a wonderful and fitting acknowledgement of her tremendous work ethic.

An old friend of mine, who had a baby girl a year ago, and I were talking about our children tonight, and I said that I am so proud of my stepdaughter’s drive and commitment. It is great fun to see a child push herself to do great things. Mine will get up at 5:30 in the morning to study for a math test she studied for an hour the day before. She leaves nothing to chance.

But the best thing about her is that she loves people and goes out of her way to be friendly to everyone. I love that about her.

All in all, I feel lucky to know her every time I have even a short conversation with her. Her enthusiasm is contagious.

Amelia Island, Florida, where I arrived this afternoon, has my favorite kind of beach. The beach here is wide with 15 yards of hard sand exposed at low tide, and it’s several miles long in front of our resort. I went for a walk before dinner, up the beach for 15 minutes and then back. A woman was walking her golden retriever. He was a large male with a thick coat and a tennis ball.

I rolled up my jeans and walked just at the water line. A family of sandpipers scampered about in the very shallow water, poking in the sand with their beaks. Flecks of sea foam covered the wet sand up and down the beach. I thought I would walk to the end of the beach and then turn around, but it didn’t end.

As I said, it’s my favorite kind of beach, the kind you can walk up and down until you’re tired, before you’ve run out of beach. There’s a beach like this at the Cape Cod National Sea Shore, and another like it at Hilton Head, South Carolina. There is nothing like the open space, which you can share with wild animals and young families. What a reminder that the world is beautiful.

I fly to Amelia Island, Florida, tomorrow morning for a business conference. I hope I will have just a little time off the clock to walk the beach. The weather forecast calls for sunny, highs in the 70s, which is heaven since it’s snowing here, again.

There is nothing like a trip to a nice place I’ve never been to make me hopeful. Just a simple change of routine helps me appreciate the simple pleasures of fresh air, sunshine, and listening to the birds singing in the morning.

My new job has me traveling more than I have in a few years, and it’s invigorating to visit new places again. I think it’s that any new scenery reminds to look at the world and really pay attention. I’ll be on the lookout for anything new. Stay posted.

This week I received several compliments at the office, including one from my boss’s boss. I’m fortunate that my boss is often complimentary, in fact, she goes out of her way to make me feel appreciated.

I should be beyond compliments by now, should be capable of judging my own efforts and achievement. Still, a sincere compliment is a gift. It makes you feel noticed and appreciated, and these states of mind help you perform with joy and purpose.

Naturally, if this is how compliments make you feel, think how easy it is to pay some yourself and to pass that feeling along to others whom you admire. My sister and I had a babysitter when we were young, Mary Allen. Mary loved to say, “You’re so smart.” That was her highest praise.

Try that tomorrow. Tell someone they’re smart. Watch them smile.

The philosopher and critic Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he discussed Leo Tolstoy’s view of history. The title refers to a famous ancient Greek poem fragment, which said, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one great thing.” I was reminded of this listening to French-American jazz guitarist and educator Allain Pacowski on Open Source tonight.

Pacowski applied these terms to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Basie knows rhythm surpassingly well (He had “rhythm down to the center of the earth” said show host Christopher Lydon). Ellington, the fox, knew lots of things musically.

I find the fox approach to the world more romantic and glamorous. I’m always envious of great athletes who are well read, or of wonderful musicians who can act. I like reading about people who are at home in New York city and the Australian outback. I have a sense that greater variety, broader accomplishment give richness to a life.

But recently, I’m coming to an instinctive conclusion that I am a hedgehog. That I will find great satisfaction in probing deeply into one thing. This is not the same as being a specialist, which I find tedious and limiting. I think the hedgehog approach or perspective means an ability to settle on something so large that it deserves profound study.

The question is “what do I seek to know to that level?” Happiness is a strong possibility. And it is endless. How can one be happy? How much happiness does a person need? What are the different kinds and sources of happiness? And so on.

If you were to know one great thing, what would it be? Or would you rather be a fox?

Esther Hicks in one of the latest “Abraham” CDs talks about the importance of turning your thought toward what you want to experience in your life. In other words, however far away your desires may seem, filling your thought with what you want rather than with what you don’t draws you closer to what you want.

It’s easy to think this is nonsense, that your thought has little to do with circumstance. On the other hand, if you accept that there is some force influencing events, then it is possible and even likely that some idea governs what happens in the world. We talk about a law of gravity. What created the circumstances in which the force of gravity acted as it does?

Fill your thoughts with the condition you want to experience. Our thought has more to do with how we experience the world than anything else. Give it a try.